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The ‘Yewtree’ Victims.

They look so young and innocent, such sombre faces. They were groomed of course; they knew what was expected of them. Older, more experienced, men and women told them what to do.

How could they refuse such powerful authoritative voices? In truth, they couldn’t refuse – for each of these young people was personally selected by the powerful Crown Prosecution Service to act in the ‘public interest’ and prosecute an ageing celebrity for ‘historic sex crimes’ – and each one of them came second.

Coming second in your law finals might be considered an accolade; coming second when you have finally managed to make it to the glossy heights of ‘silk’ or QC and it is a two horse race between you and whichever barrister the plaintiff has managed to afford is not considered an accolade. It is not something you want on your CV. In fact, whisper it quietly, but in those circumstances, coming second is sometimes referred to as ‘losing the case’…

How proud they must have been when the clerk slipped the coveted brief onto their desk, bound with pink tape. The CPS were entrusting them with a high value case ‘in the public interest’. Did they phone their Mothers with pride? We will never know. How many hours did they toil with sinking heart as they trawled through the ‘evidence’ and formatted their triumphant closing speech?

To no avail for Mark Heywood QC (the ‘Nigel Evans’ case, not that he mentions that on his web page), Miranda Moore QC (a temporary reprieve for she prosecuted in the as yet incomplete Dave Lee Travis case – no doubt her web site will catch up eventually), Anne Whyte QC ( who proudly stepped out to oppose Ken Roach’s barrister – I guess her web site will catch up too) and Eleanor Laws QC (whose web site does at least mention R v Turner, the Le Vell case, just doesn’t mention who won…)

It’s not as though these QCs were unprepared or inexperienced. They are all top flight ‘silks’ – and would certainly not have come ‘cheap’ for the CPS – they definitely didn’t come cheap for the defendants, who were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds from their own pocket for matching expertise. It was the quality of the evidence that the CPS had provided them with which failed to convince a jury that the man in the dock was a dangerous paedophile. You can’t make a Silk’s purse out of a pig’s ear…no matter how many pig’s ears you have up your sleeve.

You might imagine that the CPS is just flush with money, that they always put such expensive legal merchandise in front of a judge and jury – but nothing could be further from the truth. They are continually wailing that they are short of funds.

Nearly a quarter of the Crown’s state prosecutors have been cut as part of budget savings, leaving many in the justice system, including senior judges, expressing grave concerns about the state’s performance in some criminal trials.

It is not the public that have been complaining – it is judges. The CPS have what they term a ‘selection tree’ to decide from how high up the legal tree they will pluck their prosecuting counsel. Before appointing a QC the CPS must feel that ‘Irrespective of the offence type, […] the case feature[s] substantial complicating factors of gravity, sensitivity, complexity or responsibility which could not be adequately prepared and presented other than by Queen’s Counsel?

Obviously when Aaron Mann took it into his head to strangle mother-of-four Claire O’Connor and drive round with her in the boot of his car for four days, the CPS didn’t consider it as grave, sensitive or complex a case as – say – Dave Lee Travis being accused of ‘jiggling’ a woman’s boobs. They sent along a barrister to prosecute who made fundamental errors of law, did not understand the pathologist’s evidence and was ‘not competent to do the job’ according to the enraged Judge, who halted the trial and ordered a retrial.

Later, the same month, the CPS apparently didn’t consider a case of alleged rape to be particularly grave, sensitive or complex, resulting in Judge Jeremy Gold QC threatened to clear the defendant without a trial after ‘lamentable failures’ of disclosure by the CPS.

In Chester, Judge Elgan Edwards blew a fuse when the CPS fielded a barrister who had not had ‘time to prepare his case’ – despite the defendants having been arrested a year beforehand.

“This is a serious case and it should be taken seriously. How long does it take to prepare a case? You still haven’t bothered to draw up an indictment.

“These defendants have had this hanging over them for the last 11 months. This court is just not putting up with this kind of disdain.”

Yet when ‘breast jiggling’ and ‘hand on bum’ cases appear, the CPS do not count the cost, they throw their best barristers into the case. It is, apparently in the ‘public interest’.

In 2012 there were 45 homicide trials that failed because the CPS prosecuting counsel provided insufficient or no evidence after a not guilty plea. This was equivalent to one in twenty homicide cases and a rise of 50% from 2010.

How relieved they must be this afternoon that finally one of their glossy thoroughbreds has come home with a result. What celebrations there will be in Red Lion Chambers tonight.

Step forward the triumphant Rosina Cottage QC, saviour of the CPS’s battered reputation. A guilty verdict at last. She managed to prove to the jury that Max Clifford was a nasty little man…

Here is a quote from I. F. Stone, regarding his book “The Trial of Socrates”:

“The Athens of Socrates’s time has gone down in history as the very place where democracy and freedom of speech were born. Yet that city put Socrates, its most famous philosopher, to death. Presumably this was because it citizens did not like what he was teaching. Yet he had been teaching there all his life, unmolested. Why did they wait until he was 70, and had only a few years to live, before executing him?”

He argues that Socrates had taught a pupil whom later became one of the tyrants of Athens; hence Socrates belated trial and execution was ex post facto, or at least political, to cover up the embarrassment of unrestrained democracy.

And so it seems to me that Yewtree is about feminism trying to cover-up the moral crisis that earlier waves of feminism had brought about. Would there have been so many young girls throwing themselves at ‘celebrities’ if it were not for the feminist message of ‘disobey your father’?

Let’s see the line the mainstream media choose to take. If there is any truth to the mythology and aura said to have surrounded his professional capabilities, it may be interesting to see how many skeletons arise from their crypts, and who the bodies were related to. Having had a hamster for dessert might turn out to be just a quaint aberration, compared to some of the things that could possibly come back to life

I’d bet that, as others in his business seem to be thought to have done, he hasn’t deleted all his emails, or destroyed too many files.

‘Schadenfreude’ is defined as the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others…

The odious Max Clifford. Is it only me that is glad that he was the one to ‘cop it’? I doubt it, somehow.

In cricketing terms, the CPS must have been wondering if all of their top order batsmen were fated to score a duck and that Operation Yewtree was going to end up as another expensive witch hunt that ultimately would leave everyone frustrated, not the least the ‘celebrities’ that had been forced to defend their previous behaviour (as judged against modern moralities). They have had to pay for the privilege of defending themselves to the cost of their life savings, the roof over their heads and, of course, their reputations will never recover completely …

Thank goodness Rosina didn’t waste her time playing girly games like netball or rounders at her private school. It is fairly obvious that she learned the English Game – probably from some very butch PE mistress and it is clearly thanks to this unnamed stalwart of the education sector that our heroine managed to win the jury over.

Can’t say I have an ounce of sympathy for Clifford. Rather a nasty, arrogant, odious specimen; given what he did to a great many people through the dubious offices of the red-top press, he has at last got what was coming to him. I would imagine that David Mellor, for one, will be reflecting that what goes around comes around.

Agreed he’s a nasty, etc. specimen, but the case was decided hopefully on the evidence, not some desire that he, “got what was coming to him”. Thankfully we still (just) have a judicial system above the personal retribution level.

Anyone have any idea if eight days jury decisions are at all unusual? I recall that early Yewtree-style historical trials (Eddie Shah & Andrew Lancel) the juries were out for minutes and hours before returning Not Guilty. I guess the two years of public indoctrination has made a big difference already.

I think I had only to read his book and look at his doings in the press to know what Clifford is as a person. It hardly took all Rosina’s expensive training and expensive time, at public expense, to work that one out. That said, the jury took their time over it, as if it was a murder trial with no body and no DNA! All that for a ‘odious’ man’s poking and prodding some years ago. The usual strange interval where nil reported. I thought ‘paedophiles’ were incurable to their dying day. A lifetime of fiddling! Or is it just a frisky man with some frisky career seeking women doing what gets done when feeling frisky? Never thought that was going to become such a nice little earner for so many people in the strange future that lay before them.

I confess – no, no, nothing criminal only to ignorance – that I did not follow closely, or even loosely, any of the details in this case but my impression is that all the offences occurred long ago, there were no witnesses bar the two involved, there was no forensic evidence and there were no complaints at the time. So, how, pray, did the jury find him guilty?

Presumably because, having listened to the witnesses, the jury felt that there was less reason to doubt that it didn’t happen to some of them as they said it did, than there was reason to believe them that it really did, and that, of the reason(s) for believing them, that was without much doubt itself

Sorry, Ho Hum, you lost me – my bad! – somewhere in your argument but my understanding of the *minimal* requirement for a guilty verdict is that a juryman must have ‘no reasonable doubt’. Two opposing witnesses with not a shred of evidence on either side simply cancel each other out. The fact that there might be ten accusers for ten different occasions does not, in my simple mind, alter that basic requirement. Perhaps he should have flashed his willy to the court, that at least might have settled one point of difference!

Haven’t got time to look it up right now, but see if you can find the ‘Moorov’ doctrine as developed within Scots criminal law. It’s about the only sort of situation in Scots Law where a conviction can be allowed on the testimony of only one witness, and then it has to be based on a series of similar events at which only one witness is likely to be present

The SNP are trying to overturn that general principle now and make Scotland regress to the state of England, where the word of one person against another is sufficient to get a conviction

think the case might have been HMA vs Moorov 1935, but that’s stretching the neurons a bit

As it happens I know Nigel Evans and as a young man I would fairly regularly go drinking with him when I worked in politics. Once I even slept on his sofa after night in the pub with a crowd of us. I was not living in London at the time, and faced with the prospect of rushing to Victoria for the last train or staying on in the pub and sleeping on the sofa I took the later.

Nigel had plenty of opportunities to ‘try something’ with me, never once did, nor did he against any of the other young chaps around at the time. So when I saw that he was going to be prosecuted I was mystified, I knew for a fact that what he was accused of was simply not in his character. So I spent a long time wondering why on earth anyone was making a complaint against him.

When his ‘accusers’ started trooping into the witness box to give evidence and immediately insisted that they were NOT victims, and were NOT making a complain of any sort it all became clear. Yewtree was just desperate for a celebrity scalp and had, and this is really odd, treated their own witnesses as hostile witnesses!

On this occasion they did not get their scalp, a thoroughly decent man that I fully respect was left with a £130k legal bill though.

3 charges were dismissed and the rest upheld–only one guilty charge related to an underage girl.

It may be that the CPS are starting to get some small savvy about picking them. A simple he said/she said is v diff to disprove after 40 years. Prev they have put forward lots of charges that are larded with details that turn out to be bogus and expose the “charges” for the lies and confabulations that they are. The “raped by Ken Barlow in 1968 –after being warned by Mike Baldwin” fiasco was a good example. Savilles accusers have shot themselves in the foot more times that Mr Magoo in the same manner. Perhaps now the CPS gang are realising that they want less detail, less “colour” not more. If they have wised up that is bad news and defence barristers will have to up their game. Clifford has long been a bête noir of the UK establishment–it may be the fix is in also. Indeed he may be a groper (which makes him uncouth not a sex criminal)–but after 40 years no decent society would allow such a conviction to stand.